New Project in Tauranga, New Zealand

Our clients came to us wanting a family home that would feel calm and permanent rather than a showcase, somewhere that seems as though it has always been there. Their life organises itself around three things: the kitchen, the pool, and the view. The brief asked us to make those three things feel inevitable rather than composed. The plan is broken into connected spaces that can also be closed off: a kitchen island at the centre of daily life, a lounge that opens straight to the pool and outdoor entertaining, a separate media room for evenings together. Three groupings of accommodation follow: a principal suite, children's rooms built to grow with them, soon teenagers wanting friends to stay, and a self-contained two-bedroom guest flat for ageing parents or a live-in carer.

Before any of that could take shape, we had to work out where the house could actually stand. Current factors of safety fall below the required threshold across parts of the slope, and the instability envelope reaches into the potential building footprint. That set a limit, measured back from the toe of the escarpment, on how close to the edge the house can sit and how its foundations need to be engineered. It is the defining constraint on the site.

The concept we are carrying forward takes the escarpment and makes it the generator of the plan: rather than sitting on the terrace, the house is cut into the bank. You arrive at the upper level, which reads from the street as a single storey, and the building descends below into the ground, following the kitchen and living spaces at the top, and the children's rooms, media room and guest flat below, arranged either side of a central circulation spine with a tree growing up through the void between them. It accepts the earthworks and retaining structure that cutting into the bank demands, and earns them: the slope becomes the plan rather than an obstacle to it. It is sized well below the 713 square metre scheme we inherited from an earlier design for the site, evidence that a smaller, better organised plan can meet the same brief.

The material language is in-situ concrete, cast for a house that needs to feel permanent and given weight by the scale of the retaining structure the cliff demands. Inside, concrete continues selectively around the circulation core, where it reads as structure rather than finish, while bedrooms and more private rooms are lined in natural mineral plaster, unpainted and lightly textured. Floors run in polished concrete from inside to out, uninterrupted at the glass line. Timber warms all of it: joinery throughout, and a slatted timber ceiling that breaks up sound reflecting off the hard floors and glazing, conceals services within its depth, and gives the mid-century reference somewhere real to sit.

Comfort here begins with the building's fabric, not its machinery. Tauranga's generous sun and mild winters set the terms: deep roof overhangs shade the glazing through summer without blocking the low winter sun the living spaces are oriented to catch, while an airtight envelope with mechanical heat recovery ventilation does the quiet work of keeping the house comfortable without excess. Double glazing, not triple, is the right specification for this climate; building beyond what a site actually needs rarely serves it.

That question, what a house actually needs, sits behind the whole project. The brief was never really about square metres, but about a driveway that reveals the house slowly, a pool that works through the seasons, and spaces that will still hold the family as the children grow and parents age. Our task on a site like this is to take a difficult piece of ground and make its constraints the reason the house works, not the reason it compromises. We are really excited about this project, and we hope to see it break ground on site next year.